Once again, Erickson demonstrates her skill in limning a forceful royal who tried unsuccessfully to alter history and escape...
Russia’s last empress receives compassionate but by no means uncritical treatment from biographer Erickson (Josephine: A Life of the Empress, 1999, etc.).
Alexandra’s term for herself—“Pechvogel,” or “bird of ill omen”—seems an all-too-apt description for her star-crossed life. A German-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Britain, she lost her mother Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse, when she was only six. After her marriage to Czar Nicholas of Russia, she found herself beset by ill health and viperish tongues. Debilitating migraines, sciatica, and shortness of breath resulted from several exhausting pregnancies. Her depression was deepened by her interfering mother-in-law, the dowager empress; by a sophisticated, French-speaking court that regarded her as an interloper; and by a populace who called her the “German Whore” and scorned her inability to produce a healthy male heir. That last failure so upset Alexandra (or “Alix,” as Erickson calls her familiarly) that she came to rely increasingly on Father Gregory, the infamous Rasputin, whose mere presence could stop her hemophiliac son’s hemorrhaging. The irony, Erickson shows, is that Alix’s shyness and imperiousness masked a romantic and selfless woman. Against the matchmaking conventions of her time, Alix rebuffed all marriage overtures until she could wed her true love, Nicholas, and throughout her marriage she sought to bolster the confidence of this sensitive, weak man. While warm, affectionate, and even amusing at times, she was drawn most easily to situations where self-sacrifice was required—whether on behalf of her children or the soldiers she nursed. Ironically, her protective instincts couldn’t save herself or her family from execution by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Once again, Erickson demonstrates her skill in limning a forceful royal who tried unsuccessfully to alter history and escape fate.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-25307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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